Looking every inch a silver-maned patriarch of Biblical grandeur, Sonny Rollins, the 84-year-old genius of the jazz tenor saxophone, was especially elated last weekend to receive an honorary doctor of music degree from the University of Hartford at graduation ceremonies on its West Hartford campus.
Sure, the Grammy Award-winning Rollins probably already has a warehouse full of prestigious awards earned over his remarkable, nearly seven-decade career in which he has clearly established himself as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, most exultantly celebratory, thematic improviser in jazz history. Among Rollins’s countless coveted prizes is the Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, awarded to him personally by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.
But this new UHart award, with its honorific title, Dr. Rollins, is not merely another personal honor. It is also, in Rollins’s heartfelt view, a way to celebrate the memory of his longtime close friend and fellow jazz great, Jackie McLean, who was 74 when he died at home in Hartford after a long illness in 2006. A renowned alto saxophonist and innovative educator, McLean, Rollins’s boyhood buddy from their early Harlem years, founded the widely-acclaimed jazz studies program at UHart’s Hartt School, now known as the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.
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